It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because...
Rebuffed from his fine feelings, Milkman matched her cold tone. You loved those white folks that much?Love? she asked. Love?Well, what are you taking care of their dogs for?Do you know why she killed...
He can't value you more than you value yourself.
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than re...
I'm me, she whispered. MeNel didn't know quite what she meant, but on the other hand she knew exactly what she meant.I'm me. I'm not their daughter. I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me.Every time she said the wor...
You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.
This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the o...
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion-‘‘I don’t, ‘ She said. ‘I have my own.
Sleep without the fragrance of her hair next to him was impossible.
How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’ Milkman asked.Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [s...
Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the pro...
They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plen...
She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.
Seeing her step so easily from the pantry and emerge looking precisely as she did when she entered, only happier, taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable.
Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that’s the one for you. I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking out, the choosing. Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell ov...
Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was [...] School teacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitt...
Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true...
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.